The US magazine reported that while the "old cut-and-paste technique works well in kindergarten classrooms and papier mache projects," officials from the Zhejiang Hangzhou Yuhang government discovered it doesn't transfer so smoothly to Photoshop.

The Photoshop occurred on an official Chinese government website announcing the otherwise unexciting completion of a landscaping project. It was accompanied by a re-edited photo of government officials 'inspecting' the park.'

"The sheer awfulness of the work — one man's legs appear to blend into the shrubbery; another floats in midair several inches above a brick pathway; none of the group appear to be casting shadows met a mixture of indignation and amusement among Chinese netizens," said Time.

"It would fail photoshop 101," said Merilyn Fairskye, an associate professor of photomedia at Sydney College of the Arts.

She said the photo was hilarious. The mistakes were so obvious, they were surreal.

Professor Fairskye said altering official photos followed in the tradition of Stalin, who was famous for having officials removed from the same photo, as they fell out of favour. She says the trend to altering photos was taking off as more people, like her, added themselves to family photos. "I'll photoshop myself back into the photo if I've been the one taking all the photos," she said.

What was interesting was "how well it was done badly," said Professor Fairskye. It would be easy to fix the mistakes, she said, by shrinking the floating figures, adjusting the size of the figures and adding some shadows and different lighting.

On Twitter this morning, witticisms were flying as fast as the ninjas in the Chinese film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: